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The U.S. Army general in charge of training recently wrote about the service's examination of gender neutral standards to open the infantry and other combat-arms jobs to female soldiers. The piece by Gen. Robert Cone, commander of Training and Doctrine Command, appears in the November issue of Army Magazine, the same month three female Marines made history by graduating from Marine infantry training. Last January, former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered all services to open combat-arms roles to women that so far have been reserved for men.

Fort Hood officials plan to demolish the medical building where an Army psychiatrist killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 others during a shooting rampage in 2009. Fort Hood spokesman Chris Haug said Wednesday that Building 42003 will be razed, while other parts of the Soldier Readiness Processing Center complex are set to be moved.

There are few experiences more painful than losing a child. Learning your child was murdered and the authorities refuse to do anything about it makes the pain incalculably greater. In July 2005 the Johnson family of Missouri experienced the start of this nightmare and they have not been able to come close to getting out of it ever since. According to the website MILITARYCORRUPTION.COM, on July 18, 2005 Army PFC Lavena Johnson “committed suicide.” In doing so PFC Johnson who was stationed in Iraq at the time, shot herself in the head smashed in her own front teeth and poured...

U.S. Army in the Market for ‘Light’ Tanks Army paratroopers gave up their tanks in 1997. Now they want them back. “The infantry needs more protection and more firepower,” says Col. Ed House, Army Training and Doctrine Command manager for the infantry brigade combat team. Even in these times of deep budget cuts and a projected steep decline in purchases of military hardware, senior Army officials believe that a light tank is a high priority that should be funded. In a future war, they contend, Army airborne forces would parachute into a warzone equipped with only light weapons and might...

Article may not be posted per FR posting rules (Gannett). Link to the article here. Synopsis: The linkage was yet another example of an over-eager National Guard EEO briefing.

“The instructor said AFA could be considered a hate group because they don’t like gays,” the soldier told me. “The slide was talking about how AFA refers to gays as sinners and heathens and derogatory terms.” The soldier, who is an evangelical Christian, said the chaplain defended the Christian ministry. “He kept asking the instructor, ‘Are you sure about that, son? Are you sure about that?’” he said, recalling the back and forth. Later in the briefing, the soldiers were reportedly told that they could face punishment for participating in organizations that are considered hate groups. That considered, the soldier...

Existing ink jobs could be grandfathered in.   The U.S. military and tattoos have an entangled history. The rise of the tattoo in popular culture started with floods of inked veterans—especially from World War II—returning home with them. The first tattoo parlor in New York City, established in 1846, served to mark up Civil War soldiers. It is that strong history that's probably the reason why a blog post on the Army's website declared in 2009, "Today, it seems, you couldn't throw a rock into an Army formation without hitting a Soldier with at least one tattoo." So it might be...

... On the morning of the attack Swenson and his team moved on foot into the rural community of Ganjgal for a meeting with village elders. He and his team were ambushed there by more than 50 well-armed, well-positioned insurgent fighters. As the enemy unleashed a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades, mortar and machine gun fire, Swenson returned fire, coordinated and directed the response of his Afghan Border Police soldiers, and simultaneously tried to call in suppressive artillery fire and aviation support. ... With complete disregard for his own safety, Swenson voluntarily led a team into the kill zone, exposing himself...

Pendleton died in 1944 in Bardenburg, Germany, sacrificing himself to help knock out enemy machine guns that had pinned down his unit. The council first considered the petition — which was backed by two veterans groups — in August, but it hesitated when a resident objected, saying the city hadn’t fairly considered his group’s 2006 proposal to rename the street after civil rights and labor leader Cesar Chavez. Having determined that the city duly considered the earlier petition, the City Council passed the current proposal. But the resident who objected, Alonzo Marquez, accused the council of “race discrimination,” and threatened...

FORT HOOD – U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan will be executed for the 2009 shooting rampage on post that left 13 people dead and more than 30 wounded. The jury panel of 13 U.S. Army officers delivered the verdict on post moments before 2 p.m. Wednesday. They deliberated for less than three hours. Last Friday, the same panel unanimously found Hasan guilty of 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of attempted premeditated murder for the 2009 shooting rampage at Fort Hood. This sentencing verdict ends the court martial after 17 days. In it, Hasan, who defended himself, never...

(CNSNews.com) – “Hiding behind ‘workplace violence’ and excluding evidence on [Army Major Nidal] Hasan’s pursuit of jihad will not make terrorism go away or properly honor the American heroes who were slain at Fort Hood,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) as he lambasted the Obama administration’s decision to classify the 2009 mass shooting as “workplace violence.” “If we ever hope to defeat the ongoing threat from radical Islamism, we need to start by calling this terrorist attack on our armed forces by its name,” Cruz said in a statement Friday shortly after Hasan was found guilty on 13 counts of...

On the same day he stood up and told a packed Fort Hood court room that the “evidence will clearly show that I am the shooter, ” Major Nidal Hasan, who is acting as his own attorney, exclusively turned over to Fox News another page of the “Full Report of Sanity Board, US v. MAJ Nidal M. Hasan” that reveals how the accused gunman initially considered killing soldiers at Ft. Benning, Ga. Fox News has now reviewed three pages of the 49-page document, which details the findings of an examination of Hasan to determine whether he was mentally fit to...

On the eve of his military trial, accused Fort Hood shooter Major Nidal Hasan has released to Fox News two pages of the “Full Report of Sanity Board, US v. MAJ Nidal M. Hasan.” The military “Sanity Board” determines whether an individual is mentally responsible for his actions. Described as a “forensic evaluation,” the exam was conducted by a three-member panel. It took place at Bell County Jail in Belton, Texas on December 7-9, 2010, more than a year after the massacre at the military base. Based on the excerpt, a full report dated January 13, 2011, was released to...

There was the cry of "Allahu Akbar," a gun fired, mayhem all around, with the end result of thirteen dead and thirty wounded at an Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on November 5th, 2009. The culprit is not just any terrorist but a major in the U.S. Army, Nidal Malik Hassan. He was an officer sworn to protect, a psychiatrist sworn to help, and an American, sworn to the Constitution. American Thinker interviewed victims, their families, and someone who was a college classmate of Hassan. David Wellington in his latest book, Chimera, wrote that those serving in the military...

Here is a crazy story involving the U.S. government’s $89.5 billion Afghanistan reconstruction effort; the United States Army refuses to suspend contracts with dozens of companies tied to al Qaeda and the Taliban out of fear that it could violate their “due process rights.” It doesn’t get more outrageous than this! American tax dollars are going to the Middle Eastern terrorists that are trying to kill them. The best part, of course, is that the U.S. government has known about this for years yet won’t terminate the deals. It’s pure insanity, to put it quite mildly. A conservative online newspaper...

US ARMY PFC BRADLEY MANNING ACQUITTED OF AIDING THE ENEMY: AP

The U.S. Army is taking the expression “get the lead out” quite literally and switching to lead-free, environmentally-friendly bullets. The Army’s Picatinny Arsenal is working on a “green” version of the M80A1 7.62 mm bullet, which troops are supposed to start being issued in 2014, according to an Army press release. The Army has been looking to “green” small caliber ammo for some time now. In 2010, the Army switched to the greener 5.56 mm M855A1 Enhanced Performance Round. “The EPR replaces the lead slug with a copper slug,” said Lt. Col. Phil Clark, product manager for small caliber ammunition...

Commanders thought anti-Semitism kept him from Medal of Honor Did the American government refuse to honor a World War II veteran who was regarded as a war hero by the British Empire, because he was Jewish? The question apparently still lingered in David Rubitsky’s mind when he died, penniless, June 28 at a nursing home in East Moline, Ill., the local Quad-City Times reported. Rubitsky’s commanders claim he single-handedly killed 500 to 600 Japanese soldiers while guarding a military outpost in Papua New Guinea during the Battle of Buna in December 1942. According to Rubitsky’s account, he defended the bunker...

“With some of New York’s skyscrapers looming through clouds of gas, some U.S. Army nurses from the hospital post at Fort Jay, Governors Island, New York, wear gas masks as they drill on defense precautions”

The U.S. Army is slashing the number of combat brigades from 45 to 33, and shifting thousands of soldiers out of bases around the county as it moves forward with the long-planned move to cut the size of the service by 80,000... at 10 Army bases in the U.S. by 2017, including in Texas, Kentucky, Colorado, North Carolina, New York, Kansas and Washington.